Part of your responsibility in the IT Department is to have your servers and pc’s backed up. We back up our servers every hour but as for the user workstations we don’t have a solid solution. Instead of going to each and every computer in the company (over 150) and manually running acronis or Microsoft disk backup, is there any other way of doing this? Any suggestions?

I agree with Bill. this is where folder redirection can be a wonderful thing. using Ad you can redirect your users desktop, my documents and other common locations to a network share. this way when they log on to a different PC, or their Pc releases the magic-blue-smoke they can login to a new or different workstation and go on with their lives. Since they are saving to a server via the folder redirection now you only have one server to backup instead of 150 desktops.

Our policy is that if a workstation dies, we try to recover files for about 10 minutes before we walk away. If its not on a network drive, we aren't responsible for backup.

I don't do a full image of workstations, but we use BackupPC to back up user files. The most critical stuff is on servers, but a lot of our work is easier local. It's not uncommon for workstations to have 100GB+ of work so backing it up is important.

At every company that I've ever been a part of, the only thing that is backed up is the network drive containing their "home directory", or whatever you want to call it. You can redirect the desktop/my documents and things like that to their own network drive for backup purposes. Beyond that nothing on the PC gets backed up unless we are planning on imaging their PC with a new OS. In that case we will help to make sure that the things they need are copied up to their network share.

Make sure that no critical data is stored on workstations, its a lot easier.I have not met anyone who backs up their workstations. Make sure it is clear to the employees data not stored on servers in not your responsibility if lost. Also make it harder for them to store data on the local computers.

+1 for folder redirection. Before I came along, the company computers were a hodge-podge of disparate workgroups. Each computer was supposed to be set up to perform its own backup, but none were being accomplished. Several hadn't been backed up in years. I established an AD domain and created a folder redirection GPO. I had a serious negative feedback to begin with, but after the first (XP) machine died and the user realized they didn't lose anything, they came to appreciate the new process quickly.

Additionally, if a user lost their computer to maintenance in the past, they would simply pack up and go home. Now, I have spare computers that I can set them up with to continue working while I fix their system. Folder redirection rocks!

As said above, folder redirection, with staff trained to save nothing on the local workstation. If they choose to bypass this, then they lose it, should hardware fail. Our employee handbook clearly states the policy for data loss to avoid any legal fun down the line.

sady we are in a similar situation. Not every pc but all managers, supervisors and lawyers. We just set up passports on each of the managers and supervisors pc's and have acronis do daily differential backups

Some of the clients that I manage that are very diverse as far as hardware, I create a monthly image and store them on another PC. Only store 2 images per system. They have a lot of free space on the PC now a days. It is far quicker to reimage the system than to reload.

This is done to speed up the recovery of hard disk failure and not to recover data.

All data is to be stored on the servers which has some sort of backup being run.

YMMV and you need to decide "why" do you need to backup the workstations.

We use Virtual Servers and even then the User Profile is not backed up. There is a copy of it in Profiles of course, but users who store important stuff on the desktop are asking for trouble. There is an AD redirection for Home Directories.

This is becoming a more and more common item to do. Take a look at Datacastle. Yes, it's targeted at laptops, but it works well with desktops as well. The cool thing for me is that it's block based, rather than file based, and does de-dup on the client side. So when you're backing up, it can transfer the 100k of changes to a file, rather than the 5mb that is the ppt. You'll be amazed at how much redundant data is in your network, and how many people copy files off the network to work on them locally, so I install the client on the file servers as well. Since it already has those blocks, it doesn't have to back them up.

Just to add to what a lot of other folks have said, we use folder redirection and roaming profiles to lessen data on the local PCs. We also disallow user access to those drives. As well as negating the need for backups, it makes our HIPAA load a little less as we don't need to worry about PHI stored on workstations. We do audit them regularly just in case though.

I concur with all network redirects. If you cost out the task of backing up user's junk (sorry but most of it is) it is not a valued asset to the business. We have a corporate policy that states that anything saved locally is not backed up and that business owned intellectual data belongs on the server. We change their applications to save to their employee directory by default.

We employ Microsoft DPM Server. Easy to push out the client to the workstations on SCCM and set the specifics using GPO. Each user space is configured for 30GB, and there are a lot of exclusions on file types such as *.mp3, *.mov, etc., etc. Each workstation syncs data at a random interval every 24 hours. It's saved a TON of data so far from drive crashes, theft, etc. Cheap and easy to deploy. You can also configure a geographic layout for separate offices, then have the individual DPM servers synch upstream. Easy peasy!!!